The structure has no explicit religious motivations, but has the feeling of a church or mosque. Photo: Hansmeyer / Dillenburger

Ultimately, the architects hope to build an entire home with this method. Photo: Hansmeyer / Dillenburger

Experimental renderings. Image: Dillenburger

Architects Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger are passionate about pushing the limits of 3-D design, and their latest algorithmically generated project, a room called Digital Grotesque, is composed of 260 million surfaces and 30 billion voxels, and takes up 78 gigabytes of hard drive space. Just rendering images of the stunningly detailed, 170-square-foot space took weeks, and when they searched for a 3-D printer that could produce their cavernous creation, none of the popular plastic printers could handle the load.

CAD files in hand, the designer duo set out in search of a machine that could accommodate their architectural ambitions and found a solution in a 3-D printer typically used to manufacture engine blocks. Larger than most cars, Voxeljet’s 3-D printers build models using silica sand and are capable of producing sandy sculptures that weigh up to 12 tons while maintaining a barely perceivable 0.13 millimeter layer thickness. These machines usually fabricate sand molds for investment casting. Their output is seen as a disposable byproduct, but Hansmeyer and Dillenburger coated the gritty components with a strengthening resin and treated them like giant sandstone bricks. “The limiting factor for us was no longer the dimensions of the printable space,” says Hansmeyer, “but the logistics of transporting and assembling the pieces.”

It is an architecture that would otherwise be undrawable, and even inconceivable.

It took a year for the designers to find the right tools and fabricating the building blocks took over a month, but the massive, 9-foot tall, industrial-strength sand castle was assembled in just under a day with the help of a gantry crane and team of volunteers. The physical results are stunning, but for Hansmeyer the design process is equally impressive and was an attempt to visualize the answer to a simple question: “How could an architecture that is entirely designed by algorithms look?” Digital Grotesque looks like something that could have sprung from Antoni Gaudí’s drawing board, but the swirling, baroque shapes of the room are actually the results of a few simple equations, and Hansmeyer believes they “create an architecture that would otherwise be undrawable, or even inconceivable using traditional means.”

Despite its procedural pedigree, Hansmeyer still claims authorship over the design. “The architect is still very much the designer, not the computer,” he says, but the computational approach does change the creator’s role. Software allows for dozens of potential solutions to emerge which can then be fed back into the system to create more potential designs, but leaves the real skill is in editing the results. “The architect becomes the cultivator and moderator of these production processes and forfeits direct control of some attributes to gain control over others.”

Digital Grotesque is an amazing proof of concept, but Hansmeyer has only laid the cornerstone of what could ultimately be a cathedral built to the glory of computational design. “One of the most astonishing things, and something we’re still trying to get our head around, is that it costs the exact same amount to 3-D print a plain box as it does to print the most elaborate form conceivable,” he says. “The costs are the same, and the amount of time required is the same. It is only the outside dimensions that matter, so there is no longer any cost for complexity and no cost for ornament.”

Digital Grosteque pushed the limits of laptops and 3-D printer, but the pair of architects have big plans to 3-D print a house with details as fine as grains of sand. “It will be a house that looks like nothing we can imagine today, and is just within reach!” says Hansmeyer.